It is perhaps ironic that a period of such intense suffering
and destruction as the Great War should have produced such a remarkable body of
great writing—writing that has helped to change the way people think of armed
conflict, and to diminish (though not entirely destroy) the myth of war as
glamorous and heroic.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, British writers were little
different from their compatriots in the excitement they felt—‘Now God be
thanked who has matched us with His hour’, wrote Rupert Brooke, and even poets
like Sassoon and Owen who were later to be so savage in their condemnation
began by expressing an equally passionate idealism—one of Sassoon’s earlier
responses is entitled Absolution. The sense of religious fervor

suggested by that title did not last very long, as the
fighting men began

to realize that trench warfare—a war of attrition—could
hardly be quickly concluded, and left little scope for glory.

These poets had grown up in a tradition even then
characterized as ‘Georgian’—a mode of writing, which laid stress on a lyrical,
and pastoral tenderness set in well-crafted but unadventurous forms. What
happens to the lyrical impulse is one of the most interesting aspects of First
War poetry. Edmund Blunden, for instance, is often compelled to a kind of
inverted

pastoral, as in The Zonnebeke Road:

The wretched wire before the village line

Rattles like rusty brambles or dead bine,

And then the daylight oozes into dun;

Black pillars, those are trees where roadways run.

Something similar happens in Wilfred Owen’s Exposure, where
the men’s frozen dreaming transmutes the snowflakes into poignant memories of
spring:

We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare
snow-dazed,

Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,

Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.

Is it that we are dying?

Edward Thomas, on the other hand, retains much of the
outward form of pastoral and, writing in a deceptively simple, conversational
style, exposes through suggestive contrast the poignant losses of war:

Only two teams work on the farm this year.

One of my mates is dead. The second day

In France they killed him. It was back in March,

The very night of the blizzard, too....

(from As The Team’s Head Brass)

The experience of war, in other words, forges a new poetic,
whether it is the Imagist spareness and flexibility of Richard Aldington’s
Trench Idyll:

The worst of all was

They fell to pieces at a touch.

Thank God we couldn’t see their faces;

They had gas helmets on.

—or the visionary intensity of Owen, with his disturbing
half-rhymes and ability to set the concretely immediate in a context which on
occasions approaches the epic, as in Strange Meeting:

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined...

Sassoon, to an extent Owen’s mentor but perhaps not
ultimately his equal, developed a line in devastating ironic realism, where a
savage anger is resolved into telescoped brevity—poems like The General and
Base Details occupy as few as seven or ten lines each.

Isaac Rosenberg still perhaps awaits the recognition he
deserves for his extraordinary originality. His uncompromising style is
modernist in its

suppressed lyricism and sharpness of focus; his tone by
turns tender and ironic:

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German...

The contribution made by woman writers has only quite
recently begun to be appreciated. Women were involved in the war as nurses and
ambulance drivers, as well as having to endure the waiting at home for news of
loved ones, and both these aspects are represented in this selection. If their
poetry lacks the urgent directness of the men’s, this is hardly surprising—the
tone is more usually pastoral and elegiac, as in Edith Nesbit’s Spring in
War-Time:

Now the sprinkled blackthorn snow

Lies along the lovers’ lane

Where last year we used to go—

Where we shall not go again.

The themes of these poets, then, given their overriding need
to tell ‘the truth untold, / The pity of war, the pity war distilled’,
inevitably focus on despair, death, mutilation both physical and mental, the
saving strength of comradeship — and, crucially, protest, ranging from Owen’s
agonized cry

O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth’s sleep at all? (Futility)

to Sassoon’s bluntly satirical one-liners:

— But he did for them both by his plan of attack. (The General)

I have attempted to suggest something of the ways in which
the writers dealt with these and other themes by dividing the poems into
sections: